This blog is about my new Civil War history, Our War: Days and Events in the Fight for the Union.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

The story behind M*A*S*H

On a cold, crisp winter’s day nine years ago, Eric Moskowitz
and I went to a nursing home in Bennington, Vt., to meet W.C. Heinz, the
writer. We both admired Heinz’s boxing writing and World War II reporting. We
hoped to pick up some tips at the feet of a master.

Moskowitz, now an ace reporter for the Boston Globe, recorded the interview and transcribed it. We were
both disappointed that Heinz had dementia and often lost his way answering questions,
but I am glad Eric preserved what he did say that day. One of his best stories
was about the writing of M*A*S*H, a
minor work in a life of gems but the one that made Heinz rich.

The Nevada after being hit at Pearl Harbor.

I pulled the transcript out recently because of the hubbub
surrounding the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Heinz was off Normandy that day on
the Nevada, which had been repaired after
nearly sinking at Pearl Harbor.

He told us how World War II correspondents sent their
stories home from ships or from the field. At sea, they placed stories in
synthetic waterproof bags with lead weights in them. When a courier came
alongside, they tossed the bags in the water, where the courier fetched them
with a hook. Should the bags escape the hook, one purpose of the weights was to
sink the newspaper copy, keeping it from the enemy. Heinz did not recall losing
a story using this method.

Transmitting from a moving army on land had no such perils,
other than the obvious one that the best correspondents were those who worked
nearest the front. “Eisenhower had a great idea,” Heinz said. “They moved the
transmitter right up with the press – one in every army.” The military used
encryption to transmit the stories so that the Germans could neither interrupt
nor intercept them.

Heinz dedicated his first book to George Hicks, a well-known
radio broadcaster who was on the USS Ancon,
the communications command ship during the landings on Omaha Beach. On that day
Hicks’s “report went out first and was heard all over the world,” Heinz said. After
the two of them became buddies, Hicks told Heinz, “Your stuff is so good, you
know, you’ll be a very successful writer.”

Time proved Hicks right. The proof is in two anthologies: What A Time It Was: The Best of W.C. Heinz
on Sports and When We Were Young,
Heinz’s best stories from World War II.

Yet even Hicks could never have predicted the source of his
friend Willie’s greatest success. Heinz wrote two books about doctors and
ghosted an autobiography of Vince Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers’ football coach.
He found Lombardi obtuse. When Moskowitz asked him what Lombardi was like,
Heinz said: “Lombardi was easy to work with for one day. After the first day,
he said, ‘How long is this going to take?’ ”

The book, Run to
Daylight, sold well, but Heinz was still working up to his breakthrough.

J. Maxwell Chamberlain, a cardiac surgeon, had helped him
write his first novel, The Surgeon, Chamberlain
introduced him to Richard Hornberger, a
doctor from Maine who had written a novel about his experiences at army field
hospitals in Korea.

Heinz with his typewriter.

Heinz showed the manuscript to his wife Betty, who was from
Montpelier and had a strong sense of propriety. When she laughed at certain
passages, Heinz decided to take on the project. He wrote Hornberger, and soon
they were working together.

Heinz described Hornberger as a “shy man. . . . He said, ‘I want to get this goddamn
book published.’ ” He told Heinz he didn’t care about the money – Heinz could have
it all. Heinz wouldn’t hear of it and offered Hornberger the better portion of
a 60-40 split.

Heinz drafted three chapters and showed them to an editor at
William E. Morrow, who offered an advance of less than $5,000 – “not very much
but you take it,” Heinz said. It took
about a year to finish the manuscript. The two men worked under the joint pseudonym
Robert Hooker. Hornberger’s “characters were all what I call ‘stick people’ –
you know, they had no dimensions to them. He wanted to be a writer, but he
wasn’t, really.” Heinz turned the characters into “living human beings.” He
also did what he could to provide Hornberger’s episodic story with structure.

M*A*S*H came out in 1968. The film appeared in 1970, its screenplay
written by Ring Lardner Jr., and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.The television series
ran from 1972 to 1983.

M*A*S*H: Bill Heinz's goldmine

For Heinz the popularity of book, film and TV show meant
royalties, royalties, royalties. “The money started to grow very rapidly,” he
said. He described the weekly checks as “ridiculous . . . enormous . . . It was
a hell of a lot.”

Heinz’s career as a sports writer had ended by then. He was
in Miami in 1964 to cover Cassius Clay’s challenge of Sonny Liston for his
heavyweight boxing title. When he heard after the fight that a serious infection
had hospitalized his daughter Barbara, he rushed to her side. But the infection
killed her at age 16.

Bill and Betty Heinz moved to Dorset, Vt., with their younger
daughter, Gayl. In time the Heinzes used the M*A*S*H windfall to establish the Heinz
Family Trust to support the Department of Pediatrics at the University of
Vermont College of Medicine. It is now known as the Barbara Bailey Heinz and
Gayl Bailey Heinz Fund.

I asked Heinz, who died in 2008 at the age of 93, whether he
didn’t find it ironic that after all the stirring reporting and writing he had
done from battlefields and sporting arenas , it was a rewrite job that had made
him rich.

“I suppose so, but it doesn’t bother me,” he said. “Heh heh
heh. Oh no, I don’t want to go around saying, ‘Hey, I wrote this or that.’ But
I do get trapped all the time into the M*A*S*H thing.”

Whenever he gave a talk
about his career, people asked, “Where did M*A*S*H come from?”